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Under detailed investigation, many other tenets of this
school- indeed we might say all- could be corrected with an
abundance of proof. But I am withheld by regard for some of our
own friends who fell in with this doctrine before joining our
circle and, strangely, still cling to it.
The school, no doubt, is free-spoken enough- whether in the set
purpose of giving its opinions a plausible colour of verity or in
honest belief- but we are addressing here our own acquaintances,
not those people with whom we could make no way. We have spoken
in the hope of preventing our friends from being perturbed by a
party which brings, not proof- how could it?- but arbitrary,
tyrannical assertion; another style of address would be
applicable to such as have the audacity to flout the noble and
true doctrines of the august teachers of antiquity.
That method we will not apply; anyone that has fully grasped the
preceding discussion will know how to meet every point in the
system.
Only one other tenet of theirs will be mentioned before passing
the matter; it is one which surpasses all the rest in sheer
folly, if that is the word.
They first maintain that the Soul and a certain "Wisdom" [Sophia]
declined and entered this lower sphere though they leave us in
doubt of whether the movement originated in Soul or in this
Sophia of theirs, or whether the two are the same to them- then
they tell us that the other Souls came down in the descent and
that these members of Sophia took to themselves bodies, human
bodies, for example.
Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which was the occasion of
descent to the others is declared not to have descended. "It knew
no decline," but merely illuminated the darkness in such a way
that an image of it was formed upon the Matter. Then, they shape
an image of that image somewhere below- through the medium of
Matter or of Materiality or whatever else of many names they
choose to give it in their frequent change of terms, invented to
darken their doctrine- and so they bring into being what they
call the Creator or Demiurge, then this lower is severed from his
Mother [Sophia] and becomes the author of the Kosmos down to the
latest of the succession of images constituting it.
Such is the blasphemy of one of their writers.
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